Inspector Lestrade. Holmes’ em- barrassment is swept aside when Scotland Yard is baffled by a murder in which the victim’s spine was cleanly snapped. The Baker Street detective instantly connects this distinctive modus operandi to the presumed- dead Hoxton Creeper (Rondo Hatton)... but why are the dead bodies always found assaulted with broken china and other break-a-back... er, bric-a-brac? Bertram Millhauser suppos- edly based his script on Conan Doyle’s “The Six Napoleons,” but—as came to light in a De- cember 2003 discussion of the series by Tom Weaver and Frederick Rappaport on AOL’s Classic Horror Film Boards—it also shares several elements with Raymond Chandler’s MUR- DER MY SWEET, which was filmed as THE FALCON TAKES OVER in 1942 at RKO, and remade there (at roughly the same time as THE PEARL OF DEATH) un- der its original title. To quote Weaver:
“There’s stolen jewels or a necklace as the sought-after Macguffin; Otto Kruger as a slick baddie with his eye on the baubles (like Miles Mander in PEARL); Mike Mazurki is a big, hulking, ugly, neck-snap- ping brute lovesick for his lost Velma (the Creeper was lovesick over Evelyn Ankers in PEARL); Kruger exploits this and uses Mazurki for his own evil purposes the way Mander uses the Creeper in PEARL; Mazurki finally gets fed up, I guess, and kills Kruger the way the Creeper kills Mander in PEARL; Mazurki finds out that Velma’s been killed (the Creeper hears that Ankers will be sentenced to die) and goes into a homicidal, Creeper-like rage; and he’s shot to death by the gun-toting character he
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was advancing upon (just like the Creeper is shot to death by Rathbone in PEARL). Funnily enough, in MURDER MY SWEET,
Mazurki is killed by—get this— PEARL’s Miles Mander!”
The clincher is that both THE FALCON TAKES OVER and THE PEARL OF DEATH were pro- duced by Howard Benedict (un- credited in the latter case), who, Weaver suggests, “apparently took the idea for a disguised re- make tucked under his arm.” While THE PEARL OF DEATH has numerous points of high in- terest, the covert debt to Chan- dler among them, it ultimately doesn’t hold together as one of the series’ best. The notion of the law being thwarted by Holmes’ egocentric need to know all and know best introduces more dra- matic potential than the film cares to handle. Instead of show- ing us a Holmes torn by remorse, or placed under arrest for facili- tating a major crime, the whole matter is effectively swept under the rug as the story mechanically progresses. Rathbone does seem to be playing Holmes more edg- ily than usual, possibly because the character needs to prove himself again, but without proper exposition, he seems merely more irritable. Though he makes his museum escape with flamboyance, Conover (like the identity-changing Naomi Bates) is bested here rather too often to earn the arch-adver- sary stripes he’s accorded, and the film gives us no scenes showing how its Unholy Three (Conover, Bates and the Creeper) function as a team. This is especially disappointing since the script sketches the Creeper as enamored of Naomi, devot- edly fingering her compact with his surgically-gloved hands in the shadowy backseat of a chauffeur-driven car.
The Creeper is the movie’s ace-in-the-hole, and director Roy William Neill and cameraman Virgil Miller (a veteran of Fox’s Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan se- ries) do a swell job of building up his subhuman aura with lots of silhouetting and forced per- spective that help award-tem- plate Rondo Hatton to tower over his fellow cast members. Miller also pulls off a fascinating and unusual shot beginning at 29:46, in which a foregrounded Holmes and Watson are kept hazily out- of-focus as they walk the streets in conversation, while the back- grounds (including another of Bates’ disguises) flare with clar- ity; it may have been intended to visually parallel Holmes’ acute sensitivity to his environment in the seconds before an attempt is made on his life. Nigel Bruce is delightful as always; contrary to his reputation for playing Watson as stupid, there is a fun scene that shows him success- fully adapting Holmes’ deductive reasoning to solving a personal mystery, and he also figures in a suspense-milking sequence in- volving a booby-trapped book. THE PEARL OF DEATH looks great, with lots of restored tex- tural detail, but the welcome improvements are not as reve- latory as they were in the case of VOLUME ONE’s effectively noirish SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE VOICE OF TERROR. The audio is likewise fine and the film has been given a dozen chapter marks.
Of the four films included in VOLUME TWO, THE HOUSE OF FEAR (sometimes referred to as SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE HOUSE OF FEAR)—based on the title of Conan Doyle’s “The Five Orange Pips,” rather than on the story itself—is at once one of the most memorable series entries and, perversely,
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